THIRTEEN
IVALYS
The Marrow District earns its name.
We emerge from the safe room into streets paved with bone—actual bone, compressed and polished by generations of feet until it gleams pale in Gravebind’s eternal darkness. The buildings here are the oldest in the city, leaning toward each other overhead like conspirators sharing secrets. Some have tilted so far, their upper floors touch, creating bridges of rotting wood and crumbling stone.
Rathok moves through this labyrinth with unsettling familiarity.
“How do you know these routes?” I keep my voice low. The walls have ears in this city. Sometimes literally.
“I’ve been collecting debts here for a long time.” He doesn’t look back. “You learn the paths. The hiding places. The ways people try to run.”
I shove the thought away. Focus on moving. On breathing. On not dying before dawn.
We round a corner, and Rathok’s arm shoots out, slamming me back against the wall. His body blocks mine—massive, warm, a barrier between me and whatever he’s seen.
“Enforcers.” The word is barely a breath. “Two on the roof ahead. Another three at the intersection.”
I peer around his shoulder. He’s right. Dark figures move against the darker sky, their silhouettes unmistakable—the bulk of orcs, the gleam of axes. They’re not running. Not searching. Just waiting. Watching.
“They’re herding us.” The realization turns my stomach cold. “Pushing us in a specific direction.”
“The Ledger Master’s strategy. Let the prey tire itself out.” Rathok’s jaw flexes. “He knows we can’t leave the city. He knows we have until dawn. He’s content to wait.”
“So let’s go where they don’t expect.”
His gaze cuts to me. Sharp. Assessing.
“Down.” I point at the bone pavement beneath our feet. “Back into the crypts.”
“The wraiths?—“
“Are less dangerous than five enforcers with orders to bring me in.” I hold his gaze. “You killed six wraiths in the tunnels. Can you kill five of your former colleagues without making noise?”
Something flickers across his features—not quite a smile, but close.
“This way.”
He leads me down a set of stairs I didn’t notice before, into a black void that swallows us whole.
∗ ∗ ∗
The tunnels beneath the Marrow District are different from the ones we traveled before.
Older. The walls here have been crushed beyond recognition—no individual skulls, no separate bones. Just a smooth, darksurface, petrified by centuries of pressure into something that feels more like obsidian than remains.
Rathok moves ahead, his night-sight letting him navigate while I keep one hand on the wall, the other reaching for his back. The bone is cold beneath my fingers.
I think of the contract in Gror’s apartment. The burning pain when I touched it. The sigil that seared itself into my palm.
“I didn’t see anything on Gror’s contract on the wall. I just felt it burn.”
“Your gift was dormant. Locked away—whether by instinct or by your mother’s design, I don’t know.” The sound of him testing the air, checking for threats. “When you touched the contract, something woke up. But seeing—truly seeing the lies in a contract—that takes focus. Intent.”
“How do I learn?”
My mother. Fortune-teller. Liar. Truth-speaker. Protector.
